School in general and english class in particular were the most boring, unproductive and needlessly punitive experience I have ever been through. I have tried to pick up Shakespeare a couple of times since, and every time I have been utterly unable to enjoy it due to memories of a boring incarceration. I still enjoy reading, but not any of the material I was given at school. So to my view, they ruined those books to me for life.
I could not disagree with you more, however. Teenagers as a group sink to the lowest common denominator. They have to be pushed a bit, or all they'll read is trash if they read at all.
In my opinion, encourage teens to read trash if they enjoy it. That will at least impart the habit of picking up a book for pleasure. Maybe they'll move on to deeper material later, and maybe they won't, but at least they'll read.
If I were you, I would give Tom Sawyer a try, then Huckleberry Finn. Shakespeare is not to be missed, start with one of the comedies -- Twelfth Night, perhaps, always one of my favorites. If a good local company is putting one of the comedies on, go see it first, then get a Folger edition (very reader friendly with extremely helpful notes) and read what you just saw.
Fortunately you can usually find schools that aren't like that. We worked hard learning which schools to avoid before our children reached school age. The City of Atlanta public schools are SO bad that there was never any question of our children attending them. I wouldn't send a dog to any Atlanta public school except Jackson Elementary and Morris Brandon . . . and there's a waiting list for them about four years long. Had my children not been able to get into the schools we wanted, it would have been homeschooling for us (I homeschooled my son for a couple of months while waiting for a place to open up in the school of our choice . . . )
Try adventure novels (which is what I'd suggest for much of high school reading). Horatio Hornblower, Captain Blood (Rafael Sabatini), Kipling, Stevenson, etc. Try G.A. Henty, one of the most popular novelists of the turn of the century (20th century, that is), making a comeback among Christian homeschoolers.
Try "The Saint" detective stories. You need a top quality vocabulary and a knowledge of history, Latin quotes, French and German, and comparative religion to get through this stuff with full comprehension. Dang it, people used to be somewhat educated! "The Saint" is pulp magazine fiction, for heaven's sake, but the author assumed the reader knew French and German!
There is plenty of good, solid, classic fiction that is oriented toward the teen/young adult perspective. And let's be honest, adults love this stuff too. It wasn't teenagers buying the World's Great Pirate Novels in the 19th and 20th century, it was adults. It wasn't teenagers who made Louis L'Amour one of the bestselling novelists in history.
I dug the Harry Potter books, once I picked them up. (The hand of God placed one in the bathroom when I was up at 2 a.m. with Vlad, some months back.) Of course I bring a middle-aged-mom perspective to the stories. Want to hear my thesis on the essential theme of fatherlessness in the Harry Potter series?